Module 2: Activities 1 & 2

A Clockwork Orange is a strange movie. I remember hearing about during my Learning Theories course last summer, so my husband and I watched it. That was one of the weirdest movies I had ever seen, and I remember then not understanding half of the stuff the main character was narrating. With Exercise 3c, I wrote down all 12 of the words (with no guesses to definitions because I felt silly trying to come up with any) and read the entire chapter of A Clockwork Orange. I wrote the words in their sentences and read before and after to make sure I was understanding the context. Some of the words I had no trouble with when reading them in the sentence. However, I did notice that many of the words were repeated throughout the chapter, so my definition changed a little or left me unsure as the chapter progressed. I was still not quite sure what glazzies or zoobies were, but I made some guesses. I think I finally guessed that glazzies were eyes or glasses, and zoobies were dentures. Needless to say, I felt comfortable reading the chapter, but because of all the silly nonsense words, I would not choose to read this entire book.

With Exercise 7, I tried it on myself and then my husband. I can state proudly that I did not read the words letter-by-letter. However, I caught myself chunking some of the words into syllables (submandibular, extravasate, botrydoidal) which made me feel somewhat unintelligent…until I arrived at words like samizdat and demesne, which I had no clue how to really pronounce or define. What’s worse is that I recognized some of the words from reading higher level texts, and I have even looked them up in the dictionary, but could only define plesiosaur because it is 1. A type of dinosaur, and 2. I discussed this type of dinosaur with my students during a second grade unit. Pronouncing the words didn’t really help me generate meaning, it just jogged a memory of possibly seeing them beforehand in another context. If I see unknown words like this in a text, I stop reading and look them up in a dictionary or circle it and look them up later. Regarding implications with students and unfamiliar print words, I would encourage them to do the same: sound it out, try to determine their meaning from the context or schema, and eventually find the meaning using another resource. When I showed the same words to my husband (whom I consider to be quite intelligent), he was able to pronounce all of them except sapogenin and botryoidal. I caught him pausing before moving on to the next word, which signified to me that he was sounding them out in his head before saying them out loud.  He knew 5 definitions and then said the rest of the words were “dumb.” However, we both want to know what samizdat means. I guess I will go look that up…wait a second, is this even a real word? (yes it is, but I couldn't find it in two of my dictionaries!)